Russia

Jun 09 //
Jed Whitaker
Kholat (PC)Developer: IMGN.PRO Publisher: IMGN.PRO MSRP: $19.99Release Date: June 9, 2015
Picture this: You're famous Hollywood actor Sean Bean and you're investigating the deaths of nine hikers while stumbling around Russian mountains and collecting letters and pages from their journals. Now picture that as a game and you have Kholat.
It would be easy to write this off as another Slender clone, as part of the formula is the same: you walk around finding pages, while occasionally having a run in with a shadowy figure. What sets Kholat apart is that the ghostly figure isn't constantly chasing you, and every page discovered delivers another piece of the story, be it via text or top-notch voice acting.
Kholat plays out in three acts, of which the second is the main meat of the game. Act Two takes place in the snowy mountains where the hikers met their demise. You've got a map with key locations listed in longitude and latitude, a compass, and a flashlight. The goal is to visit each of the nine marked locations to discover key pages to give insight on what exactly happened to the hikers.
While finding the nine main locations is the overall goal, many other pages can be found throughout the mountains that provide tidbits of information into what happened there. The game saves each time a new page is found, which gives some incentives to find them other than just experiencing the story, as you may find yourself dying often.
Gaseous orange shadows will show up in certain areas of the mountains mostly requiring stealthy movement to avoid, though at times running is the only option. Scripted events occur where orange clouds start to close in around you, and a nearby page must be found before the monsters within can take your life, though these are few and far between.
If you're like me, you're going to get lost a lot. Turns out when everything is covered in snow, it looks very similar, but at least Kholat is easy on the eyes. There are some varying locations, from caves, to a charred forest, to a giant spooky tree, to a throne of bones. Each one is a unique and memorable set piece where something important is to be discovered.
The scariest part of Kholat isn't the monsters that lurk in the dark, but the feeling of anxiety and urgency brought on by it capturing the feeling of being lost in the wilderness. Each location is coupled with realistic ambiance and weather that when combined with the equally realistic graphics really nails the feeling of being lost on a mountain in solitude. At one point I considered muting the game to give myself a break from the dread coming over me, but I pushed on.
The voice-acted pieces of the story are very believable and chilling. While some pages you'll find just read like generic journal entries, others are downright horrifying thanks to a well written and acted script. There are various people writing the pages, providing different perspectives on what happened on the mountain over time. Unlike many games with collectible journals, I find these actually worth seeking out.
Little to no directions are given to the player -- you're just dropped into the world and expected to figure things out on your own. It wasn't until my second play session that I realized the locations marked on the map were of importance. After figuring out proper use of the map and compass, it was easy to complete the game in just around four hours, which felt a bit light for the asking price of $20, considering most of your time will be spent looking at snowy rocks. Overall an enjoyable experience that has a fantastic presentation but just lacks much depth in gameplay.
[This review is based on a retail build provided by the publisher.]

Sean Bean's Mystery IncorporatedKholat is based on the Dyatlov Pass incident, which is arguably one of history's greatest mysteries; nine hikers go missing and are subsequently found dead in the snowy Russian mountains.
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Aug 20 //
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Masters of the Broken World (PC)Developer: Unicorn Games, Snowberry ConnectionPublisher: Snowberry ConnectionRelease date: 2012
The universe is shattered, with Shards of land floating around in space. As a "master," it is up to you to take control of all these masses and bring them together to forge a new world in your image. Meanwhile, others are trying to do the same. Taking control of a Shard yields you bonuses and advances for what was being described as a "tech tree," although some information may have been lost in translation. Either way, you want and need to control all of the Shards.
When you select a Shard from this galactic map of sorts, you enter a Total War-esque overworld with a top-down map divided into provinces. You and the AI opponents have one castle that must be defended at all cost, as the player who captures all castles wins control of the Shard.
Your castle has nine districts that can each be developed for your military power, economy, etc. If you've played a Heroes of Might & Magic game, it's a bit like that. Completely different from HOMM is how your army works. You are able to recruit up to four heroes, with every hero becoming increasingly more expensive to purchase -- and I'm talking a lot more expensive.
Contrary to HOMM, you won't build hundreds of weak-but-inexpensive units; instead, every unit is simply one unit with its own upgrade system. Essentially, they act as mini heroes. Units are of different alignments, and the units you use reflect upon your own alignment. Use creatures like orcs and other monsters -- instead of priests and human units -- and your alignment will shift accordingly.
On the Shard's overworld, you can move your hero's army around to other provinces, which pops up a kind of quest and choice screen similar to how King Arthur did it. Some provinces may ally themselves with you by fulfilling a quest somewhere else, others might need to be paid off, and if you want you can just attack them with brute force. When you choose the latter, you will enter a King's Bounty-like form of combat in which the terrain of that province on the overworld defines the terrain in combat.
Units line up on opposing sides of a 2D hexagonal map where the terrain gives different bonuses to different units. Archers receive a bonus on hills, mages are better off in forests where they have better defense, and so on. Since you only have one unit that you can become attached to over time, by upgrading and nurturing it, they are much more precious than the kind you just purchase by the dozens in a city barracks.
Every unit has three bars: health, stamina, and morale. If you use a unit, its stamina will drop. The consequence is that you can't use one super powerful unit to destroy all enemies while ignoring every other weaker unit. Morale is affected by how the battle progresses, but also by the type of units in your army. Throw "light side" and "dark side" units together, for lack of a better term, and morale will drop.
The classes of heroes you choose can affect stats like army support, diplomacy, and magic. Maybe you'll want a mage to deal a lot of damage (heroes fight in combat themselves), or maybe you'll want a support class that allows you to support larger armies.
If you do go down the dark path with an army full of monsters and keep selecting the "evil" choice in quests, your economy will suffer compared to the more light-side alignment that boosts your economy. After all, nurturing your cities and society does tend to lead to better economies than being feared as a warmongering dictator. You'll have to make your decisions according to your play style and whether you want to field large armies or develop your economy while resolving province requests through diplomacy.
Once you take over a province, you can also explore it with your hero. This will reveal things like hidden artifacts and dungeons that boost your economy even more. To top it all off, you can use diplomacy to form alliances on a Shard.
Masters of the Broken World seems to pick elements from some of my favorite PC strategy games, improves them, and puts them all in one game. It's a single-player game at the moment, but the producer mentioned that because they self-publish they can take their time to think about what they want to do for the final product.
It may take a while before we'll get to play it, but Masters of the Broken World is certainly one of the games at gamescom that I'm looking forward to the most.

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Sep 21 //
Ben Perlee
Apache: Air Assault (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360)Develop: Gaijin EntertainmentPublisher: ActivisionTo be released: November 16, 2010
To be clear, usually these sorts of titles appeal to a specific fanbase. While military simulations are always popular, they have a tendency to alienate more casual users by not offering the right sort of experience to appeal to everyone. Thankfully, publisher Activision and Gaijin Entertainment have added variations of difficulty to make the game more enjoyable to different audiences.
For those who would rather get in the chopper and not worry about technical maneuvers or careful flight techniques, there is the Training Mode. While it restricts you from performing certain helicopter actions, it does let players go through the entire campaign without too much difficulty. For a greater challenge, there is Realistic Mode, in which players have only three lives. For players who really love helicopter action, there is finally Veteran Mode, offering only one life and finite ammo.
The helicopters themselves are all Apache brand choppers: the Apache AH-64D Longbow, Apache AH-1, Apache AH-64X Experimental Prototype, MQ-8B Fire Scout, and Mi-35 Hind. While only major helicopter nerds will know the variations by name alone, players will find that each one controls and functions differently. Compared to airplanes, these machines need a wider turning radius, can obviously hover, and generally function in a manner very different from other flight simulators. Helicopters unsurprisingly have special abilities, and Apache pilots will be able to maneuver these machines vertically and nearly upside down, for example.
These abilities range from hovering to shooting techniques. Dodging missiles is as easy as dropping altitude, yet to gain speed, the player must dive the Apache downward then swing up, much like a glider. There is a lot of flexibility with these vehicles, and it's going to require a minor learning curve even for those players who are comfortable with flight simulators. One impressive feature is how the helicopters handle variations of damage, such as flying with a damaged engine at the expense of mobility. However, certain parts, like the rotor blades, cannot be taken out without bad things happening. You get my drift.
While flight simulators don't exactly offer in-depth plots, Apache: Air Assault tells the story of three different Apache crews working for a fictional UN military organization fighting insurgents across the world. I suppose it'll get the job done, but let's admit it, no one will be playing this game for the plot. However, missions themselves are rather dynamic. Objectives will change on the fly, and goals never take more than a few minutes to perform. The first level I was shown, taking place over the plains of Africa, guided us across bluffs and dusty roads while we took out insurgent vehicles. After reducing one insurgent town to rubble (hey, it was filled with no one but guerrilla terrorists, alright?), our Apache had to defend a fellow downed helicopter in a much larger city as insurgents attacked both us and the soldiers on the ground waiting for airlift.
Success in this mission involved locking the Apache into a hover position, then switching over to a shooting mode, alternating between a tactical black-and-white vision cam that highlights enemy vehicles and an infrared cam that highlights enemy soldiers as solid white against a field of black. It looks pretty great, and once the rescue crew showed up, the mission became an escort mission. Within 15 minutes, missions varied from taking out targets, defensive aerial battles, and escort challenges. If the whole game can keep up with the variety, fans of flight simulators will have a lot to like. If not, they'll appreciate the free flight mode, with a whole set of variables to keep the gameplay dynamic.
With regards to multiplayer, Gaijin Entertainment is taking a cooperative approach. Apache: Air Assault offers 13 multiplayer-exclusive modes with up to four players acting as a squadron to work through more team-based missions. Though online only, the main campaign can be completed as a co-operative team with one player acting as the pilot and the other as the gunner.
Coming away from the game, it's clear that fans of air combat games and flight simulators will find a lot to appreciate and enjoy. Clearly, it's not for everyone, but it's a niche title for a niche audience. However, there seems to be a strong amount of polish and focus on making a helicopter title that works. It also helps that it is a great looking game with very lush and realistic geography and a solid draw distance. Hopefully, Gaijin Entertainment and Activision can keep things together and release a quality Apache helicopter simulator when Apache: Air Assault launches this November.

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